Neither Wolf Nor Dog

American Indians, Environment, and Agrarian Change

David Rich Lewis

Neither Wolf Nor Dog

American Indians, Environment, and Agrarian Change

David Rich Lewis

Description

During the nineteenth century, Americans looked to the eventual civilization and assimilation of Native Americans through a process of removal, reservation, and directed culture change. Neither Wolf Nor Dog explores the experiences of three groups--Northern Utes, Hupas, and Tohono O'odhams--with settled reservation and allotted agriculture in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Each group inhabited a different environment, and their cultural traditions reflected distinct subsistence adaptations to life in the western United States.

Author David Rich Lewis shows how each group experienced the full weight of federal agrarian policy yet responded differently, in culturally consistent ways, to subsistence change and the resulting social and environmental
consequences. Attempts to establish successful agricultural economies ultimately failed as each group reproduced its own cultural values in a diminished and rapidly changing environment. In the end, Lewis demonstrates, such policies and agrarian experiences left Indian farmers marginally incorporated and economically dependent.

Neither Wolf Nor Dog

American Indians, Environment, and Agrarian Change

David Rich Lewis

Author Information

David Rich Lewis is Associate Professor of History at Utah State University and Associate Editor of the Western Historical Quarterly.

Neither Wolf Nor Dog

American Indians, Environment, and Agrarian Change

David Rich Lewis

Reviews and Awards

"An important addition to the growing body of literature about the origins of Native American economic dependency....Recommended for readers at all levels."--Choice

"The solid prose in Neither Wolf Nor Dog reflects thorough research and scholarship....By making American Indians historical actors and by listening to their voices, Lewis makes this a model study."--Nebraska History

"An excellent book....This study will be useful for anyone interested in the agricultural and environmental history of the West. Moreover, much of his study concerns the twentieth century, and it can be used to generalize about the agricultural and environmental experiences of Native Americans throughout the region as they attempted to accommodate a white-controlled world."--Environmental History Review

"David Rich Lewis has written an extraordinarily perceptive analysis of attempts of the United States to force agriculture upon three nineteenth-century Native American tribes....Lewis's book is well-researched, documented, and nicely-written. It will be useful to students and scholars in a variety of disciplines surrounding western American history and Native American studies. I highly recommend the book."--New Mexico Historical Review